Anyone who has tried to wrangle co-workers or friends to make dinner plans knows the struggle: Group decision-making is painful.
Alejandro Campos Villacres and Tillson Galloway met as students at Georgia Tech, and wanted to find a way to tackle the problems created when a group needs to reach a consensus.
Squeet (a combination of ‘squad’ and ‘meet’), uses a Tinder-like swiping interface to narrow down group decisions. Users can select and curate a deck of potential restaurants, Netflix movies, events, or create a custom option for a group to vote on.
Soon, the team will also be rolling out a web app version, so that people don’t have to download the app to cast a vote.
Villacres and Galloway went through Create-X at Georgia Tech in 2020, an entrepreneurial accelerator program designed for students. “When we came up with this startup two years ago…we didn’t really know what would make us successful,” said Galloway. “That was what Create-X really helped with.”
Currently, Villacres is back in his home in Ecuador and Galloway is completing his schoolwork at Georgia Tech. They also have a full-time marketer and a part-time developer on staff.
COVID AND BEYOND
The team certainly recognizes that COVID has changed the patterns of how people meet up with their friends and others in their network. But they also believe the pandemic has brought some unique opportunities to the tech community.
“Covid made us think more critically about the problem we wanted to solve,” said Galloway.
For Villacres, people will continue to search for “technologies that will help them communicate better and try to make their lives a little simpler.”
But the team sees opportunities to improve more than just how individuals pick a movie to watch.
“In the future, I don’t want you to only think about us for swiping and matching. I want to think about the poll market,” said Villacres.
Knowing that the poll market currently deals with a general lack of engagement, Squeet is looking towards ways to improve how people and companies collect feedback.
